Sir Peter Levin Shaffer, CBE (15 May 1926 – 6 June 2016) was an English playwright and screenwriter of numerous award-winning plays, of which several have been turned into films.
The best of Mozart's works cannot be even slightly rewritten without diminishment.
Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.
And in fact, I think one of the best guides to telling you who you are, and I think children use it all the time for this purpose, is fantasy.
Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.
Figaro is a bad play. It stirs up hatred between the classes. In France, it has caused nothing but bitterness. My own dear sister,Antoinette, writes me that she is beginning to be frightened of her own people.
He'll be delivered from madness. What then? He'll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him!. . . My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband - a caring citizen - a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost!
Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.
The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.
What was evident was that Mozart was simply transcribing music completely finished in his head. And finished as most music is never finished. Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and structure would fall. I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at Absolute Beauty.
Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.
Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.
You can't always let people do their own thing.
All reined up in old language and old assumptions, straining to jump clean-hoofed on to a whole new track of being I only suspect is there. I can't see it, because my educated, average head is being held at the wrong angle. I can't jump because the bit forbids it, and my own basic force - my horsepower, if you like - is too little.
Worship isn't destructive, Martin. I know that. I don't. I only know it's the core of his life. What else has he got? He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make to world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends. Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He's a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist.
I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.
All my wife has ever taken from the Mediterranean - from that whole vast intuitive culture - are four bottles of Chianti to make into lamps, and two china condiment donkeys labelled Sally and Peppy.
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship?
I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.
All I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing and then made me mute.